Pursuit - Softcover

James Stewart Thayer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140093230 ISBN 13: 9780140093230

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1988

Synopsis

"Belongs in the same company as The Day of the Jackal . . . Brutal, brisk, and believable . . . . The finale sings." -- New York Daily News

A strategy born of desperation: an assassination to end the war.

Only one event can turn the tide. Hitler believes that the death of one man—Franklin Delano Roosevelt—will save Nazi Germany. From a prisoner of war camp near Fort Lewis, Washington, where 50,000 German soldiers are interned, Wehrmacht Captain Kurt Monck—a man of frightening resources with ruthless intelligence whose devious determination is sparked by Berlin’s orders via secret channels to escape the camp and head east.

Monck’s trail is picked up by U.S. Secret Service agent John Wren, who hunts Monck as the German nears Franklin Roosevelt’s armored train en route to the Democratic Convention in Chicago.

Monck’s only aid comes from his reluctant accomplice Margaret Bayerlein, a widow who provokes a haunting triangular relationship.

PURSUIT evokes the American home front during the war, as well as historic figures such as J. Edgar Hoover and President Roosevelt. The manhunt crosses the country, and Monck, Wren, and Roosevelt finally meet in an electrifying conclusion.

Heart-pounding suspense for readers who love the taut thrillers of Jeffrey Deaver and Frederick Forsyth.

“I simply could not put it down.” -- St. Louis Post-Dispatch

About this title

About the Author:

James Thayer is the author of thirteen critically-acclaimed novels, and Clive Cussler has called him “a master story teller.” Thayer is the son of a wheat farmer, and he was raised in Spokane and the farm country in eastern Washington. He graduated from Washington State University and the University of Chicago Law School, and now teaches novel writing at the University of Washington extension school where in 2015 he received the Excellence in Teaching Award in the Arts, Writing and Humanities. The New York Times Book Review says his "writing is smooth and clear. Deceptively simple, it wastes no words, and it has a rhythm that only confident stylists achieve.” His The Essential Guide to Writing a Novel is a leading manual for fiction writers. Thayer is a member of the Washington State Bar Association and the International Thriller Writers. He and his family live in Seattle.

From Publishers Weekly:

U.S. Secret Service agent John Wren is best known among his colleagues as the man who tied his wife's murderer to a desert cactus and left him to be devoured by coyotes. German WW II saboteur Capt. Kurt Monck has a similar reputation among his own forces, and this pair matches wits in a taut cat-and-mouse game across home-front America when Berlin orders Monck to escape from a Seattle POW camp in order to assassinate FDR. Wren finds a romantic incentive for the chase as well as a political one in Monck's reluctant accomplice, Margarete Bayerlein, a beautiful German widow whose daughter is being held captive pending completion of Monck's mission. The highlight of the novel is the fictional glimpse Thayer gives us of the liaison between FDR and the wealthy, well-born Lucy Mercer Rutherford. Thayer (The Hess Cross, The Earhart Betrayal) mixes romance, history and supense well, and while the Secret Service's leads in the case come a little too coincidentally, the tension and gruesome violence that permeate the tale are entirely credible. 50,000 first printing; $50,000 ad/promo. February 20
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0140093230
• ISBN 13: 9780140093230
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 404